BIOS sees drive but not Explorer

[anim]

I have two IDE drives that were working prior to tonight. I am running Win XP pro. I am having a problem where the BIOS IS seeing my slave hard drive (Seagate ST380021A), but I do not have access to it (not seen in Explorer).

Disk Management does see it, but it no longer has a Volume ID. It is no longer typed as having an NTFS file system, and from the looks of things, my 30 GB of data is gone as it is saying that I have 100% free space. It is calling both my boot HD and this one primary partitions. I do not have the option of apply a drive letter to it either.


Any thoughts on how to get things back, or what's happening?
(Sorry I cross posted this as a reply in another thread.)

 

[TomCologne]

While troubleshooting a different issue, I came across this:

In case of a NEW hard drive on a system with no operating system:
If and when a new Drive is added to a system, make sure that the Drive is been properly partitioned and formatted. A drive which does not have a valid partition on it, will not be detected by any windows operating system. Therefore windows will not be able to install on the system.

In case of a added hard drive to a system which was taken off from an other computer and it can not be seen under windows:
this normally happens to customers using windows 95, 98, 98SE, and or ME. please make sure that the transferred hard drive has a VALID "FAT32" partition on it. if this hard drive belong to a system that had windows NT, 2000, and or XP on it installed, there is a very good chance that the partition on the transferred hard drive is NTFS which can not be detected under windows 95,98,98SE, or ME. in this case customer need to remove the existing partition on the drive and create a "FAT32" partition on the hard drive. Same situation can happen to users using windows 2000, or NT. since the existing system runs with "NTFS" partition, operating system will not be able to recognize a hard drive with "FAT32" partition. in this case customer needs to remove the "FAT32" partition, and create a "NTFS" partition on the drive, for windows NT or 2000 can recognize this hard drive.

http://www.soyousa.com/kb/kbdesc.php?id=74

Diskbutchr, with a WD HDD, make sure the jumper settings are correct, then try booting from the XP-CD,see if the drive is listed and go from there.

You're not alone,

TomCologne

 

[Dreamland]

I'm wondering if this is another quirky XP thing. Why don't you folks run the XP version of Partition Info (free - part of PartitionMagic). Changes nothing - it just displays your disk's partition info:

ftp://ftp.powerquest.com/pub/utilities/PartInNT.zip

Unzip and run right in XP. If there's missing stuff here, then boot the machine with a Win98/ME boot disk (XP can make a ME-based system disk from it's FORMAT option) and run the 32-bit version of PartInfo courtesy of PowerQuest:

ftp://ftp.powerquest.com/pub/utilities/PartIn9x.zip

I can't imagine there's really a difference at the disk-level. Pay special attention to what the File System code is for the partition(s) on your invisible disks (column FS). Good luck. However, If you should be captured or killed during this mission, we will disavow any knowledge ...etc. etc.

 

[wolluf]

In XP you just need to use disk management (run diskmgmt.msc) to set up (partition/format) new drive. It won't be seen in explorer till it is partitioned .